What's the most interesting thing about tumblr for you linguistically?
Those tags where people write essays. I’m obsessed with those. They’re downright amazing linguistically!
I even proposed to do a research experiment on phrases, the juncture of syntax and semantics, and tumblr tags for my Computational Corpus Linguistics course. The teacher approved the project, but I ended up discarding it for a later time because of how difficult and involved the task would have been. There were too many problems to work out in the experiment and I realized I didn’t have enough time to do what I want.
The tags are intriguing for multiple reasons. They frankly make me run around like a chicken with his head cut off - except happier.
Syntax and Cognitive Science The tags show some very interesting things about phrasal structure. People divide up long sentences in tags during pauses. It’s unique “punctuation” and it says a lot for how people chunk thoughts, process them, and organize longer statements. It’s interesting where you see punctuation added or deleted; it helps you see cognitively how people are processing phrases.
Semantics The tags are full of very interesting expression techniques. One of the problems of written language has been that it lacks body language, which constitutes over half of our expression in conversation. It means that written language can be very easily misinterpreted for intent (think of how many texts get misinterpreted). But tumblrites and other social media savvy people have compensated and made written language HUGELY expressive. You see it in the tags. You see people use unique punctuation effects like deleting spaces, intentionally misspelling words, adding capitalization, and much more. There are emoticons, keyboard smashes, explosions of exclamation marks, and so many beautiful ways of expressing emotion. And people use lots of words in fascinating ways to get their thoughts across. It’s endless.
Diachronic Linguistics Historical linguistics is really cool. It’s about language change. Internet speech in tumblr has the latest, newest words and word units out there. You see so much beautiful language change happening. It’s how “Rickrolled” became a verb and “smol” grew its own set of recognized connotations. Word meanings change, take on new meanings, are filled with so much amazing sociolinguistic context. Abbreviations are made for fandom content. Abbreviations eventually become treated like real words, and then they take on new suffixes and become verbs and adjectives and nouns (”I lol’ed”). There are certain phonotactic paradigms English speakers subconsciously follow for creating new shipping names; I’ve even seen a linguistics paper on that topic. People are able to understand new terms they’ve never seen before; I’ve never heard of “Ruffheat,” but if someone said that to me, I’d know right away they’re talking about a Ruffnut x Heather ship. If someone told me “Hiccaang,” somehow I’d be able to figure out they’re talking about some Aang x Hiccup crack ship. We can just do that automatically because we’ve built our own compounding systems! And not only do we do that, but language changes SO FREAKISHLY RAPIDLY on tumblr it’s constant excitement.
Sociolinguistics Language varies based upon different groups we are a part of, and tumblr is full of many communities. Fandom communities, the science side of tumblr, the social justice community, and more are all out there. Each group has its own diction, vocabulary, and more. It’s also amazing how this collides with the fact that tumblr is global; the conversations arising aren’t just from native English speakers, but individuals whose first language might be Malay, Khmer, German, Korean, Japanese, or Finnish.
So yeah. And where you see all this amazingness the most is in the tags.
Believe me, I tag browse a lot because the content there is GOLD. Pure GOLD.
Someday I do hope to take my tumblr experiences and conduct a legitimate linguistics research study. It can teach us a lot about contemporary English, internet English, and how it’s used around the globe.inguistic
jbbartram-illu
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janainaart
andulkaphoto
origamiaround
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